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Starship: A minimal, fast, and customizable prompt for any shell

starship.rs

61–70 of 216 posts

Re: Starship: A minimal, fast, and customizable prompt for any shell

#61
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For personal workstation, the current directory is enough. Maybe I change the color based the status of the last command. That’s pretty much the only information I need before entering any command. Everything else can be accessed when I really need it.

Problem is you can't get timestamps and run times of your commands 'when you really need it', unlike almost everything else

For a personal workstation - you should never "really need it".

It's a personal machine and should be treated as disposable. Doing anything less is fairly irresponsible.

So sure - turn on timestamps for your ssh bastion (although it should be in the logs already...), or turn them on for the ci/cd pipeline (not that you should need them there anyways, since it should be dumping tons of timing info already).

But a personal machine? Plain ol' ">" is plenty.

Not that there's anything wrong with a maximal prompt either... I've definitely done the "configure all the powerline settings!" thing. But I also don't mind a simple ">" or "#".

Re: Starship: A minimal, fast, and customizable prompt for any shell

#62
post #49
post #15

every time your shell takes 100ms to render git status that you didn’t even need, you're paying invisible tax on flow. terminals should be reactive memory tools, not passive decoration. we optimize for code runtime but not for our own typing latency

If you're used to, say, VS Code or the GitHub online editor where the lag between pressing a key on the keyboard and a corresponding character appearing on the screen can be on the order of tens of thousands of milliseconds, then 100 ms will seem like lightning.

There's a thousand milliseconds in a second. If your VSCode is taking +10 seconds to display a single character, it might be time to upgrade from your Commodore 64.

Re: Starship: A minimal, fast, and customizable prompt for any shell

#63
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need to know what branch you're on before running commands? I cant tell you the number of times ive been on the wrong branch executing stuff.

I literally use just PS1='$ '. `git status` to know git stuff. `pwd` for the current working directory, etc I also don't use aliases like `gs` or `..` One good thing about having a very minimal setup is that you feel at home anywhere. It wasn't always like this. I used many, many prompts and shell tools over the decades. The only tool that stood the test of time is tmux.

Same here. I definitely went through a powerline, alias, huge vimrc, etc phase, but it turns out just sticking to the base toolset is pretty handy.

I can sit down at (or ssh into) any machine and be basically just as productive, and it also turns out that I just always want to know more than nicely fits into the prompt anyways.

There's something to be said for accepting the defaults of a tool, and learning to use them well. Customization is powerful, but... I think most times it's not the right call until you're already an expert in the tool at hand.

Re: Starship: A minimal, fast, and customizable prompt for any shell

#64
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need to know what branch you're on before running commands? I cant tell you the number of times ive been on the wrong branch executing stuff.

I literally use just PS1='$ '. `git status` to know git stuff. `pwd` for the current working directory, etc I also don't use aliases like `gs` or `..` One good thing about having a very minimal setup is that you feel at home anywhere. It wasn't always like this. I used many, many prompts and shell tools over the decades. The only tool that stood the test of time is tmux.

Same here, I also find that aliases for speed introduce unnecessary complexity and mental overhead later on. It's not much, and for other people it doesn't matter or they have a different preference, but that's what I prefer.

Sort of contrary to that I really enjoy the maximalist shells. A computer should be fun to use!

Re: Starship: A minimal, fast, and customizable prompt for any shell

#65
post #46
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here, that's what prompted my search. I felt I could get closest with oh-my-posh.

That was the same thing that drove me to find an alternative and I also landed on ohmyposh specifically because starship lacked the transient prompt.

I'm not 100% sure what a transient prompt is, but it looks like Starship now might have support for them.

[right prompt docs] https://starship.rs/advanced-config/#enable-right-prompt [transient prompt docs] https://starship.rs/advanced-config/#transientprompt-and-tra...

Re: Starship: A minimal, fast, and customizable prompt for any shell

#67

I like maximalist prompts, and indeed Starship is what Shell Bling Ubuntu [1] installs on a new dev machine. But they're not everyone's cup of tea. If I wanted to recommend to someone the min-maxed, highest density thing they could add to their prompt, it would simply be the time your current prompt appeared + the amount of time the last command you ran took. These two pieces of information together make it very easy…

I never bothered configuring my prompt at all because, inside emacs, I could already see most of what I needed in the editor itself.

In fact, I only set up Starship when I started to do more pairing. It wasn’t for my benefit as much as it was for those watching my screen and checking the work, especially when operating on prod and confirming what we wanted to run. I just load up a separate terminal app for that so I don’t have to walk people through my setup.

Re: Starship: A minimal, fast, and customizable prompt for any shell

#68
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For personal workstation, the current directory is enough. Maybe I change the color based the status of the last command. That’s pretty much the only information I need before entering any command. Everything else can be accessed when I really need it.

Problem is you can't get timestamps and run times of your commands 'when you really need it', unlike almost everything else

Well, that's why you build it into the prompt. So you don't give yourself the opportunity to forget.

Re: Starship: A minimal, fast, and customizable prompt for any shell

#69
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need to know what branch you're on before running commands? I cant tell you the number of times ive been on the wrong branch executing stuff.

I literally use just PS1='$ '. `git status` to know git stuff. `pwd` for the current working directory, etc I also don't use aliases like `gs` or `..` One good thing about having a very minimal setup is that you feel at home anywhere. It wasn't always like this. I used many, many prompts and shell tools over the decades. The only tool that stood the test of time is tmux.

See when I don't have a prompt I forget to run those things and just autopilot through a lot of commands before I realize Im on the wrong branch.

For example if I have say 3 worktrees open in 3 seperate tmux tabs and are context switching between them (very common when reviewing multiple PRs from my devs) Sometimes i will get the tabs mixed up, which worktree is where etc and just autopilot a bunch of commands meant for one tree into a different one and its quite annoying to clean up.

The prompt has generally stopped me from doing that.

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